[taneq]

The other thing is that technical debt is not always bad. It's just another stat to manage along with budgets, ROI, available engineering time, customer engagement, etc. etc.

If you have a product that's nearing end of life and you can boost its value for another year with a quick hack, then do it. If there's a system that really needs refactoring and is getting harder to extend, but still works fine as it is, then you leave it alone. If things have gotten a little curly but are still serviceable, just roll with it. You don't just trash everything, obviously, but a year from now when you retire that codebase, any extra time spent on it now will be wasted.

In your new flagship product that you have no plans to replace for the next 5+ years, you take the extra time to keep everything nice. You re-engineer whatever needs re-engineering to add that feature like it was always meant to be there. You refactor the smelly bits of the code. You push back entropy to keep it shiny because it's likely to be worth it.